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chimpo13 writes "A new filing in the King Lincoln Bronzeville v. Blackwell case includes a copy of the Ohio Secretary of State election production system configuration that was in use in Ohio's 2004 presidential election when there was a sudden and unexpected shift in votes for George W. Bush."

Real Clear Politics poll aggregation showed that Bush led Kerry going into the election in Ohio, and had led nationally since the September before the election - it would have been surprising if Kerry won. Exit polling can be and has been unreliable - that's why it's only used as an indicator and not on it's own (precinct turnout is usually more indicative of who's going to win).

Really, just let it go. Kerry just lost - sometimes that's all there is to it.

But Thats the Problem with election Machines, or E-Voting.
You can't know. You can't Recount. You don't know the source. YOU CAN NOT VERYFY.
This is why e-voting undermines the base of democracy.
What we need is a competition for voting macines, like for encryption http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Encryption_Standard [wikipedia.org]. To declare an open standard after the worlds brightest securtiy people tried 4-8 years to break it.
Oh, and Voting over the Internet or by text messaging? I can think of so many things that can go wrong that it should be illegal.

Las Vegas casinos have better security than what we (collectively) put on election systems. There's a good reason for that as Las Vegas casinos need to be vigilant about their income else they risk violating a bunch of laws under which they operate. After all, they need to pay taxes on that money. The more money they bring in, the better for them and the better for their community. There are cameras that watch the entire flow of money coming in and going back out to make sure that nobody is trying to be

The found votes were from different areas, not all in one district. In King County, Gregiore got 65% of the additional votes. She got 57% of the total votes in that county. All of the King County votes were found in a 3 day period (and most were on one day), not "weeks on end".

Really, just let it go. Kerry just lost - sometimes that's all there is to it.

Letting Bush-vs-Kerry go is easy. That's all done.

Saying "that's all there is to it" is total bullshit, though. How many other races were decided by the same machines in the 2004 elections? How many other elections were these machines used for? Did you check the exit polls for all of those too?

How do you feel about the next election, which is likely to be run based on identical policies, known to be vulnerable?

Well, when the CEO of Diebold (the company making the voting machines), Walden O'Dell [wikipedia.org] is also doubling as a major Bush fundraiser and promising to "to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the President", is anyone really surprised that serious questions were raised about these e-voting machines--which were already controversial long before Wally O'Dell ever started fundraising?

Some things are still best done the old-fashioned way. And voting is one of them.

Here's what's really annoying about that particular quote: I can't find the full text of it, least not in 15 minutes of noodling around on Google. There are tons of references to that quote, plenty of references to the responses to the quote, but nothing at all which could put that quote into context. I'm not saying it's a case of misinterpretation... but I am saying that we don't have the facts. What we have is a great soundbite.

Then we have this FTA:

Spoonamore also swore that "...the architecture further confirms how this election was stolen. The computer system and SmarTech had the correct placement, connectivity, and computer experts necessary to change the election in any manner desired by the controllers of the SmarTech computers."

Which sums it up nicely. The filings show how it could have been stolen - but do not prove that it was stolen. It seems to me that the same can be said of any election using this equipment and architecture.

In spite of that, I agree with your statement. The old fashioned way seems to be the one that is most foolproof. While that process can obviously be hacked as well, it typically needs to be done on a machine by machine basis and is quite a bit more traceable.

IN mid-August, Walden W. O'Dell, the chief executive of Diebold Inc. , sat down at his computer to compose a letter inviting 100 wealthy and politically inclined friends to a Republican Party fund-raiser, to be held at his home in a suburb of Columbus, Ohio. "I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year," wrote Mr. O'Dell, whose company is based in Canton, Ohio.

Contextually, that tell us that he did this in his capacity as a supporting member and fundraiser. I think this makes it more likely to mean that he intended to raise funds either from Ohio constituents, or simply to show financial support within the state of Ohio. The connection between this and voting machine fraud seems to have been a fabrication of later media reports and/or bloggers -- but again, without the full original letter to provide c

I wonder what it means if this suit succeeds? Does it mean that mean that all laws Bush signed after the 2004 election are illegal along with all executive orders from the same time period? Personally I doubt that will be the case but I do wonder especially since the article didn't go into what the suit was about. For those who would like to complain about the 2000 election that one already went all the way to the supreme court so we are kind of stuck with that decision.

Being someone who lives on an entirely different continent, I don't really care about this whole affair, but I am nevertheless curious as to what's going to happen if this suit ends with concluding that the elections were stolen.

Maybe they will throw Bush into jail. So what? What's past is past, and having someone serve prison time won't help a bit. I mean, prison time is to punish someone for their deeds and hopefully teach them to not do it again. Bush won't do it again anyway, and punishing him could g

Maybe they will throw Bush into jail. So what? What's past is past, and having someone serve prison time won't help a bit. I mean, prison time is to punish someone for their deeds and hopefully teach them to not do it again.

Prison time also serves as a deterrent to prevent others from doing it.

It means all the laws stand, but we put an asterisk by his name in the history books. Other than that, we promise to try really hard not to let election fraud go unnoticed next time, and it is back to business as usual.

I read through the article and all I found was information that it was possible to do so - but we at Slashdot ALL know that all electronic voting systems are heavily flawed. I didn't see any evidence in the article that voter fraud actually did occur, only that it was possible.

What IS mentioned is that an intermediate vote count was transferred to another server, but that just means that early vote totals were made available, not that fraudulent votes were cast.

The filing also includes the revealing deposition of the late Michael Connell. Connell served as the IT guru for the Bush family and Karl Rove. Connell ran the private IT firm GovTech that created the controversial system that transferred Ohio's vote count late on election night 2004 to a partisan Republican server site in Chattanooga, Tennessee owned by SmarTech. That is when the vote shift happened, not predicted by the exit polls, that led to Bush's unexpected victory. Co

Well, they copied the headline verbatim from a known partisan website. It's worth noting that truthout.org made a stronger claim than the actual legal filing did, as far as I can tell. Blame chimpo13, not slashdot.

It says that they were set up to be a fallback authority with complete control to be able to modify votes in case the primary systems failed. Those who were responsible for overseeing the systems were sent home by agents of Blackwell, and during that time, control was sent to these fallback servers even though there was no evidence there had been any failed systems to spur it.

They could only steal votes if they were granted the failover scenario, and the architecture made it easy to do so should that have happened - so easy in fact that it appears evident that it was designed with this purpose in mind. Then, private contractors take control of things late in the evening of the election, transfer control to the fully-falsifiable system, then transfer control back, all without any evidence that there had been failures to trigger the transfer of control.

They had motive and opportunity, and the design of the system is such that any actual proof against tampering could be falsified without means of detection. You're right, it doesn't say "votes were tampered with," but the only remaining possible evidence would be a confession. The one man who began to disclose more details died in a mysterious plane crash shortly after.

Oh thank God, someone on Slashdot actually has some sens. All it takes is one quick visit to TFA to see that that news site is the most biased news outlet I have ever seen. Its literally more sensationalist than Fox News, just in the other direction. The people who wrote the article authored no less than 4 books like "Did George W. Bush Steal America's 2004 Election". The entire things takes "it might have been possible to hack the election" to "look! It was possible, so they did!" They don't say "reveals how it might have been hacked", which would be true, they say "was hacked", which they have absolutely no proof of whatsoever. Just suspicions, and their suspicions at that. And saying people died in "a suspicious plane crash"? Thats some nice inuendo right there. They are literally suggesting that Bush had a person killed for testifying against him. Over the top, much?

Vote tampering in Ohio does not excuse the Democrats for losing that election.

No, but a weak candidate doesn't excuse vote tampering either. No matter which way I vote, I'd like to know that it counted. I'd like to know that it's not being tampered with for profit, malice, or mischief.

Let's not forget how Bush became President in the first place. The Democrats nominated Al Gore in 2000. Everyone remembers how Florida results were within the margin of error for their stupid punch card ballots. But nobody seems to remember that Gore lost his own home state (Tennessee), which in my opinion should result in automatic disqualification. If your own state won't vote for you, go directly to epic fail.

Bush was one of the weakest candidates in modern times. In a way, he was similar to Nixon. Both were weak candidates who enjoyed the benefit of weaker opponents. Nixon defeated Humphrey in 1968 and McGovern in 1972; Bush defeated Gore in 2000 and Kerry in 2004. Obama might fit into the same discussion, having defeated the Republican throwaway ticket of McCain/Palin in 2008. It remains to be seen if the Republicans can nominate a weak enough candidate to give Obama a second term.

As someone who lives in Tennessee, I don't really blame Gore for losing here in 2000. Gore's political ideas were far too progressive for this backwater hellhole. Mainly, he wasn't christian enough, in that he had respect for non-Christians, and in that he relied heavily on science for making decisions, rather than the bible. It really would have been wasted effort if he'd tried. I mean, the people here think that god punishes america with natural disasters because of abortions and gays.

How much of this is incompetence and how much is really malice? As much as everyone seems to like a good conspiracy I have a feeling that this is probably going to be more like the Sony PSN security breach and less like the Sony rootkit DRM fiasco

Exit polls are, frankly, more reliable then our actual vote tallies now. The Florida ballot was, quite clearly, confusing. Go look at it from a statistical perspective - Buchanan's results were clearly skewed, as acknowledge by everyone but Bush (Meaning, Buchanan agreed they were screwed up too!), because only Bush had soemthing to gain. Oh, and he was elected president without a plurality popular support. In Florida, back then, the Republicans clearly proved that they were in this to win the presidency, n

Winning an election by the rules is not the same as winning the popular vote. The republicans proved that they were interested in winning an election, and they surely would have liked to win the popular vote too, but that wasn't as important.

Exit polls are very accurate if done properly, Ohio wasn't the only state with discrepancies in 2004 Florida, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada and Iowa exit polls all showed Kerry winning and none of them he did win. Either there was a fundamental flaw in the exit polls of those swing states or there was election fraud in many states.

Perhaps it was, but it was also a system that had existed for a long time and had been used across the country. If it was unsuitable, it should have been dealt with before a major election and not during because you think you can recount a few select counties and win. Personally, I still think scanned paper ballots are way to go for the foreseeable future.

I agree that it should have been addressed earlier, but that doesn't mean that it should be considered valid when the problems it caused were significant enough, and the election close enough, that it could have caused a change in the outcome. Even more so for a presidential election.

By the time it comes down to actually voting for one of two "viable" candidates, the statist agenda is bound to be fulfilled. There are meaningful differences between Republican and Democrat, but on the whole they will both tend to do things that increase the role of federal government in our everyday lives and insidiously undermine our rights.

Give me a third party with the size and principles to actually change the course of government and I'll care more about what happens in the final round of elections.

There are no meaningful differences between Republicans and Democrats, unless you count their donors. It is, and has been for some time, a one-party system with the veil of "choice" pulled over the eyes of the voters. Both parties increase the power of the Federal government (against the constitution and the will of the people), and both parties want more of our money.

The only difference (if you can call it that) between the parties (besides the mascot) is their stance on "scary social problems" like gay marriage and abortion. Both of which have nothing to do with governing and the federal government, if it were Constitutionally sound and legal, would not be involved in either item at all. The Constitution makes clear what the federal government can do, yet we keep electing these asspiles who ignore it.

I wish there was enough outrage to give a third party support, but it appears the deck is stacked against any candidate that isn't an elephant or donkey.

"The only difference (if you can call it that) between the parties (besides the mascot) is their stance on "scary social problems" like gay marriage and abortion. Both of which have nothing to do with governing and the federal government, if it were Constitutionally sound and legal, would not be involved in either item at all. The Constitution makes clear what the federal government can do, yet we keep electing these asspiles who ignore it."
A budding federalist, I see? "Nothing matters... except these sm

It's particularly disappointing that you want the size given to you. It sounds like you're saying you refuse to vote for real candidates (assuming someone else does the job of giving them to you), unless a bunch of other people vote for them first (of course, by then, it's too late and the candidate has lost, because you refused to vote along side them, since that candidate's victory had not already been assured).

Your attitude is why we can't escape the Democrats and Republicans. You are the problem that you're complaining about.

Imagine the world where Thomas Jefferson wrote:

When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, we can only hope that someone gives those people what they want. King George is bad, and we humbly request him to appoint a new king. (We don't care who; that's not our problem.) If he refuses to do so, we will continue to recognize his authority but we'll be slightly irked.

But the problem with electronic voting is that your hack can happen in seconds, and do far more damage than an army of corrupt vote counters and ballot stuffers and truck drivers who get lost while delivering paper ballots. Plus your attack vectors are orders of magnitude more numerous, because you're dealing with a more complex systems.

Democracy is about trust. Voting should not be a black box: votes in, sausage out. We on Slashdot are all technophiles: anything can b

Most of the accusations of voter fraud stem from one horrible shortcoming in American elections. Quite simply, it's a lack of transparency. If the election work was done out in the open for all to see, we wouldn't have so much fraud. But that's exactly why it's done in secret. Both sides WANT fraud. When things aren't going their way they want to have all sorts of leverage to shift the election to them. Ballot stuffing has a long and glorious tradition in this country. The Republicans are being accus

We have a different type of electronic voting. Oregon uses vote by mail, and each person fills out a scan-tron form (something a 2nd grader can do). Not only is there a paper trail, but it is proven technology.

Voting intimidation is eliminated when you vote in your own home and you don't have to deal with crowded poll places. I don't understand why more states don't do this.

And now for the tangent, more and more we are seeing the evil republican label. Similarly, it is the socialist, Marxist liberals. Both labels are hyperbole. The two parties aren't all that different really, they agree on most things. The thing that kills me is people don't realize that to make it to congress, you must be at least millionaire. You want to know why the Bush tax cuts haven't expired? Why the democrats haven't beaten the republicans over the head with it? They don't want to see their own taxes go up, just like the republicans. They just have to talk a good game to continue to be elected.

It is only when their supporters really get pissed off that they do something, because they like their cushy job and free, government run health care.

As for claims of vote hacking, neither side really wants an investigation. Think about it, right now the US is seen is fat, lazy and stupid. Do you really want to add slow to that mix? While it would make a lot of us feel good, from the outside, if a former president is put in jail, what does it look like?

Probably something like, we're stupid, fat, lazy, slow and cannot properly investigate a crime. The last thing anyone on either side wants to do is suggest that our law enforcement is somehow inadequate, it would just invite others to exploit that. It is the same security theater as TSA, just on a different stage.

I wish more technical people would volunteer to work the polls, and could spread the word about the controls built into our voting process.

The first thing they'd learn is that votes are counted at the PRECINCT level. There's no "master server" in the sky where votes can be manipulated. The real votes are counted machine-by-machine, under the eye of volunteers who swear under oath that it has been operated properly. The machines print out a paper receipt of the tally, and that gets backed-up on hard disk and flash. The paper tape total is called into the Registrar. The paper records of the vote are certified by a local Board of Election, the machines are sealed, and the paper and flash media is typically also sealed and sequestered under a local Court.

The servers used at the state levels are merely there to REPORT the results of the counts made at each precinct. They are not the actual vote tally. If the database is wrong, the Board goes back to the paper trail and updates it with the correct tally.

Paper receipts at the voting machines are actually NOT a good idea, IMHO. Paper is a horrible medium for conducting an election: it can get lost, smeared, ripped, crumpled, folded, etc. There's a reason we don't run our accounting systems using ledger-books anymore, but instead use a computer. Those reasons apply double for voting. A computer-based tally is a dream to manage compared to the nightmare that is paper.

I would like to see better use of paper for making spot-certifications that a machine is operating properly, but I would never want to run a whole election using paper. The error rate of paper can run as high as 1-2%. The error rate of a computer tally is minuscule by comparison.

But while we're at it, why not replace the old fashion voting with an American Idol style one? I mean, it's not like money didn't already rule the whole deal, let's at least be honest about it. And while we're at it, we could use that lot of 1-900 money to balance the budget.

And the real bitch? They didn't need to hack shit to rig the election, just run off those they didn't want to vote. Look up videos taken in Ohio of the 04 election and you'll see the poor neighborhoods would get one or two broke ass machines while the rich areas got MUCH more machines than required, those that tried to hand voters a slip that pointed out their right to ask for a provisional ballot, since they were making people wait several hours in line only to tell them "you're in the wrong place" and expect them to go do it all over again were first threatened and then arrested, the whole thing was a scam from the word go.

Of course with BOTH parties now owned legally by the megacorps thanks to Citizens United you might as well not bother, hell the ballots might as well only have two choices "Show your love, vote for supermegacorp!" or "Teach those guys in DC a lesson, vote for supermegacorp!".

What I have seen is the opposite. In many states, ID requirements are weak, and urban districts are notorious for less than robust verification of IDs. Illegal aliens have a number of ways to slip through the cracks and vote. Although the Ohio system may have been designed to facilitate fraud, the low-tech systems of other states were designed to facilitate other types of fraud. There are many ways to rig an election.

The beneficiaries of tax-and-spend policy are those who receive the spending, not those who pay the taxes. Considering how much money gets pumped into welfare and medicaid, I find it hard to believe that poor people are under-represented at the voting booth.

Although I wonder if you can call the top 10 states Republican, you can definitely say the bottom 10 are mostly Democrat. Either way, I wish they would adjust that list for the effect of indirect federal spending. For example, Connecticut is ranked 48th at 69 cents on the dollar. But it's also Santa's workshop as far as Pentagon spending is concerned. What Connecticut fails to receive in direct federal spending it receives via indirect Pentagon spending. Connecticut is where they make submarines, heli

LOL wut? Dude the red states are the poorest in the nation by a pretty long shot. States like MS, AR, LA,OK, these states are traditionally poor as fuck and vote republican year in and year out.

Now if you wanna argue that the MIC is sitting there with their hands out and we waste money on crap like planes and aircraft carriers we don't even need? Right there with ya pal. But trying to say people vote D because they are getting a check simply doesn't jive with the numbers. Hell every one of the poorest sta

No, the elections are run by the state they're in, not "locally". In Ohio, they're run by the Secretary of State, who was Ken Blackwell. That's why Blackwell is the defendant in this court case. Blackwell was also simultaneously the Bush/Cheney 2004 Ohio Campaign Manager, the clearest possible conflict of interest. Evidently that conflict itself is not illegal in Ohio, though it's probably up to the SoS (Blackwell) whether that conflict is prohibited. But in this case the conflict evidently saw the Bush/Cheney campaign manager to change the votes cast to hand Bush/Cheney the state's Electoral Votes. Not to mention how the conflict saw Blackwell short poor/Black (Democratic) neighborhoods of machines in which to cast original votes.

And of course Ken Blackwell executed directly to whatever plans Karl Rove dictated to him. That's what state campaign managers' jobs are. And both of them have lied about it for years now.

The real question is why you are lying about how elections are run. You're a Republican, right? And don't tell me you're a "Libertarian", or an "independent". Did you vote for Bush in 2004? 2000?

I'm not sure they haven't. I have been following this story for years, since I learned there were shenanigans going on with the electronic voting. Back before the 2008 election, Hillary pulled a surprise victory in the New Hampshire primary, defying exit polling. After what went on in 2000 and 2004, it caught my notice. If you accept the theory that there is a power elite that stands behind the government, these rigged voting machines could be used to swing elections in any number of ways.

"Just remember, this is the United States of America. We write 80 million checks a month. There are millions and millions of Americans that depend on those checks coming on time," Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner

Not to comment at all on the rest of it (I've got a paper to write!) but, I thought it was strange people jumped on that number and conflated it to mean that our government is supporting 80 million freeloaders (not saying you specifically, but if you look at the rabid articles about it on the internet, that's the impression I get)

a) There's no comparison made to other countries, so that's just an arbitrary measurement in arbitrary units (If I told you the higgs boson was 114 GeV, and didn't give you any sense of scale, would you think that was big or small?)

b) When you look at the breakdown, 55 million of those checks come from only social security. Are we now arguing that people who collect SS are freeloaders?

c) Of the remaining 35 million checks, 10 million checks comes from tax refunds (they obviously cluster around april 15th, but when you amortize it, it's 10 million/month)

d) We're down to 25 million checks then, and pay for veterans benefits (4.1 mil), retirements (2.6 mil), and contractors (1.4 mil) out of that leaving us with ~16.9 million or so checks.

The breakdown I found has more categories, but I picked off all the things that would be pretty non-contentious (I didn't include medicare or medicade, which seems to be a lot of people's big target these things). It's not like our government is a freewheeling money-printing machine like people keep making it out to be

The breakdown I found has more categories, but I picked off all the things that would be pretty non-contentious (I didn't include medicare or medicade, which seems to be a lot of people's big target these things).

What's contentious about MediCare, unless you're an extremist? MC is just like SS: it's something you pay into when you're young, and then you receive payments when you're old. It just has a different aim; SS gives you a pension, while MC is health insurance for old people. But it's certainly no

I agree with you, if he called it for what it is, a class rebellion, the 1000x poor folks vs the 1x rich folks would finally have their say!

but think about it - 100.0% of the politicians are NOT the poor folks! they and their cronies will be up against the wall when the rev comes. no one in power WANTS the revolution; they have everything to lose!

calling attention on class struggle is never going to happen here. obama, while black, still acts like a 'rich spoiled white guy'. he's not a lea

The fact that it matters that he's "half anything" is the biggest problem. I was kind of hoping that we would have gotten over the whole race thing and not made such a big deal about the color of our President but it seems that racism still has some way to go. I guess it's pure naivety on my part since we still have organizations setup simply to "benefit" people based on race.

Actually, what you need is a political culture in your state that values integrity and good ideas over party loyalty. A great example of this is New Hampshire: Their Secretary of State, Bill Gardner, has been in office since 1976, throughout both Democratic and Republican governorships and legislatures, mostly because he's very good at his job and widely seen as valuing clean elections expressing the will of the voters.

Compare that to Ohio, where Secretary of State is often a very politicized position and where Ken Blackwell (the defendant) was doing everything he could to ensure that his party would win. These kinds of things were widely reported in newspapers:- Rejecting voter registrations from heavily Democratic areas because they were on the wrong paper stock.- Rejecting voter registrations from liberal political groups because they had, in order to comply with applicable laws, submitted all the registration forms they got, including ones from Mickey Mouse and the like.- Refusing to do anything at all about churches explicitly endorsing Republican candidates (if a religious body endorses a candidate, they are supposed to lose their tax-exempt status).- Putting fewer voting machines in precincts likely to vote Democrat than in precincts likely to vote Republican, so that Democratic voters had to wait for hours to vote while Republican voters took about 15-30 minutes.

So long as each state is wholly responsible for their own election standards and processes, even for presidential elections, there will be no way to address problems centrally in an organized fashion.

You could also say:So long as each state is wholly responsible for their own election standards and processes, even for presidential elections, there will be no way to corrupt them centrally in an organized fashion.

He was using 'tax exempt' as a shorthand for donations to it are tax exempt.

There are various types of non-profits that exist in various ways. 501(c)(3) is 'charitable' organizations. To be a 'charity', which means people can donate money to it and those donations be tax deductible, it cannot endorse a political candidate. It must serve the public good, or at least not do various things that the government explicitly excludes from 'the public good' list, and promoting individual candidates or legislation is the most obvious exclusion. (And the other most obvious one is that it must be organized to help society at large, or at least some subset of society, and not just members.)

Other non-profits, generally under the 501(c) area of code, do not have to, for example, pay income tax, but people cannot deduct donations to them from their taxes. For example, the Freemasons are a 501(c)(10). You cannot deduct the dues to the Freemasons from your taxes.

Almost all churches attempt to fall under the 501(c)(3) 'charity' banner. If they endorse candidates, they risk losing their 'charity' status, which means people cannot get a tax deduction from donations to them.

The law's over here [cornell.edu]. Although the 'you can deduct the donation from your taxes to a 501(c)(3)' rule is somewhere over under the personal income tax code.

Actually it just proves that we should trust neither slashdot nor truth-out.org for headlines. If you read TFA it essentially says that a case is made that the architecture made it *possible* for fraud to have occurred; and TFA is apparently trying to slant that as proof that it *did* occur. It is less clear whether or not those pursuing the case are trying to make the same point; or if their point is only to prove that the architecture allowed the possibility of fraud.

Actually it just proves that we should trust neither slashdot nor truth-out.org for headlines. If you read TFA it essentially says that a case is made that the architecture made it *possible* for fraud to have occurred; and TFA is apparently trying to slant that as proof that it *did* occur. It is less clear whether or not those pursuing the case are trying to make the same point; or if their point is only to prove that the architecture allowed the possibility of fraud.

TFA is guilty of not having any idea how computers work. They claim the vote totals were manipulated by a "man in the middle" machine that received votes from the precincts, changed them, and then forwarded them on be counted. The site assumes that electronic data is the same as paper data, meaning that once you send it, you no longer have a copy of it. The article never makes any attempt to show that the data forwarded by the supposed "man in the middle" computer was somehow different than the data it received and even implies that such verification would be impossible. All TFA does is say that the servers that collected the data changed it, as if it were fact, for no other reason than a result they didn't expect, even though it matched polling data prior to the election.

Here is just a single example of the crap from the article (emphasis mine):

The filing also includes the revealing deposition of the late Michael Connell. Connell served as the IT guru for the Bush family and Karl Rove. Connell ran the private IT firm GovTech that created the controversial system that transferred Ohio's vote count late on election night 2004 to a partisan Republican server site in Chattanooga, Tennessee owned by SmarTech. That is when the vote shift happened, not predicted by the exit polls, that led to Bush's unexpected victory. Connell died a month and a half after giving this deposition in a suspicious small plane crash.

So the vote totals went from the precincts (article doesn't say how GovTech received the data or where from, so we have to assume), and sent it to a "partisan Republican server", (can a server be partisan?) out of state, which is where the vote totals changed. What happened to the totals after they hit SmarTech? Does SmarTech host a website that simply posts vote totals to the public? Article doesn't say. We are left to assume that somehow, SmarTech then forwarded the totals to the Ohio Secretary of State. So, according to TFA, the votes went like this: precincts --> GovTech --> SmarTech --> (We don't know, but somewhere official), instead of precincts --> Secretary of State servers. Why?

Seriously? No independent, or even partisan group has bother to look at the vote totals, reported precinct by precinct on every news network in America received directly from the precincts themselves, and realized that the numbers that reported then were different than the final count?

This article is pure BS. I think the point is to accuse Republicans of vote tampering to insulate the Democrats from any accusations in the next election. Or maybe they are just hoping that GWB was never really elected. Who knows. It's BS either way.

Check your facts. News orgs. did check in FL after the 2K election and found that Bush would have won. He did not steal the election. However, I disagreed with the Supremes when they wrote that it was too late and gave Bush the win.

Except for that whole removing thousands of democratic voters from the roles even though they were qualified to vote thing, right? I'm sure that had no possible impact on an election that hinged on a few hundred votes, right?

That depends on how you recount. If you recount the entire state gore wins. If you only do the contested areas then bush wins.

If you change the rules and recount the whole state, then Gore may have won. However, as I remember it, James Baker, the representative for the Republicans in FL 2000 wanted a full state recount but the Gore people rejected it, opting to only recount the heavily Democratic areas trying to squeeze every vote out of the areas where he was likely to get more votes and leave the Republican areas as they were.

If what you say is true, and I have heard nothing to back that up, then it sounds like the Democrats sc

If what you say is true, and I have heard nothing to back that up, then it sounds like the Democrats screwed themselves. So Bush didn't steal the election. Democrats gave it to him.

In more ways than one. The outrage over Clinton's handling of the Elian Gonzalez debacle enraged the quite sizable Cuban American community in Florida. And while Gore did some half-assed back pedaling on the issue, there were probably more than 500 people who were so mad over how Clinton, and by extension Gore, handled the whole thing that they either changed their vote, voted for a 3rd party, or abstained. Had Clinton just let the whole thing slide then the election may have turned out very differently.

I guess you could consider the whole thing a study in chaos theory. Had Gonzalez's family waited another year to try to flee Cuba history may have turned out differently.

bush brought religion to the US from day-1. sorry, but I consider that to be his worthless act #1.

after that, it was an endless stream of crimes against americans. liberties taken, wars started, economies collapsed, companies getting more powerful and the state also getting more powerful. government in your bedroom and 'every child left behind'.

you want more? I got LOTS more.

he was a hated asshole and I hope he has a very bad terminal illness and suffers great pain for the rest of his life. he fucked u

Depends what you mean by "pretty good". He spent a large percentage of his time on vacation in Texas, basically ignored National Intelligence Estimates about Al Qaida, and the only major legislation he pushed through before 9/11/2001 was the giant tax cut, mostly for the wealthy, that now has the budget in a serious hole. So if you like tax cuts on principle, you think he did pretty good. If you think the job of the president includes protecting the US from terrorist attack and responding appropriately if t

Spoonamore also swore that "...the architecture further confirms how this election was stolen. The computer system and SmarTech had the correct placement, connectivity, and computer experts necessary to change the election in any manner desired by the controllers of the SmarTech computers."

The 2004 election was stolen the new fashioned way. If people haven't they should really Google Stephen Spoonamore. He has this shit down.

I believe they were talking "north of 10%, and possibly 15%" before the stimulus.

Hmm, a quick Google, and I find that unemployment rates under Bush peaked at about 7% when he left office (average over his terms looks to be between 5% and 5.25%, based on a quick eyeballing of the graph).

Since then, it's been higher, though it looks like it may have peaked at about where it is now.

Note that these numbers are the official numbers, and thus don't include people who are no longer collecting unemployment.

No, they weren't. The projected unemployment rate was 8.8% without stimulus [3cdn.net] and just under 8% with stimulus, with a footnote that some private forecasters said it would get as high as 11%. There are numerous other sources for that report, that was the administrations take on it, and their model was clearly crap one way or another since the actual unemployement rate with stimulus was higher than their models allowed for without it. There is no actual evidence that the stimulus decreased unemployement (it

Umm... The unemployment numbers have always been garbage. The length of time that unemployment could be collected has been increased, so the numbers went up.

The Republicans would drop it to a month, and the numbers would be down to a couple of percent, and they'd say "Look how we improved things! Low unemployment!" while people are jobless, starving in the streets.

Hmm, could that sudden shift have been caused by people getting off of work and then voting?

That's a good one, there. We heard about the massive lines in the largest cities in Ohio, where working people had to stand in line for several hours to vote if they lived in less-than-affluent districts. Many people were unable to take enough time off of work, and simply walked away from the line, not casting a vote at all.

The significant choices that were made by the republicans in charge included the number of voting machines available per location, which directly influences how long it takes to get through the line. There was nothing even remotely approaching equality in terms of voting machines per capita in various voting districts in Ohio. Suburban whites found they could vote in 5 minutes, urban blacks found it took 5 hours or more.

And am I supposed to believe that not only do all "working people" vote Democrat, they all voted Kerry?

No, but you should be aware of the blatant voter suppression effort that took place

In 1992 Clinton ran on a platform to lower taxes. In 2004 Senator Kerry said that he would repeal the Bush tax cuts for households with incomes over $200,000, but not the middle-class tax cuts, which he would make permanent. He also proposed a new refundable tax credit for higher education expenses, and changes to the estate tax. On balance, these provisions would reduce federal revenues by at least $425 billion over ten years. For businesses, Senator Kerry proposed a 5 percent (1.75 percentage point) redu

Or you can cast people who disagree with you off in to a position that isn't theirs, but you don't have to think about and can reject on its face. That's political discourse, right?

It seems you have been paying attention to the world around you. Yes, that is the essence of politics: trying to demonize the "other side" and try to get the idiot populace to hate and/or look down upon them.

This whole argument is "it could have happened, therefore it happened."

If you care at all about the integrity of our electoral system that's the position you have to take, no matter who benefits from the error. We won't send a man to jail when there's reasonable doubt, why should we elect a president on less?

The sad thing is. Both parties do it, and it is an injustice to the American people. It's nothing more than two groups of greedy bastards trying to get money and power at the expense of the sheeple who won't do anything about it.

Oh, there is way more to this one than mere liberal whining and "it could have happened, therefore it happened." I fully concede that the whining over the 2000 election was unwarranted (and frankly made the Dem's look like sore losers, which was embarrassing). But in the particular case of Ohio in 2004, there was some REALLY FISHY stuff going on there. The CEO [wikipedia.org] of the company making the e-voting machines was a major Bush fundraiser (which is highly unethical and a serious conflict of interest in and of itself), promising to help deliver Ohio for Bush in fundraising letters. Combine that with the discrepancy between the results and the exit polling, and you have a situation where serious questions have to be raised about the whole situation there. And O'Dell later resigning from Diebold amid charges of insider trading a year later didn't exactly bolster a reputation for honesty on his part. The whole thing cast a real cloud over the legitimacy of the results in Ohio.

Does all that NECESSARILY point to corruption? Of course not. But it sure as hell raises the question of it.

Not only that, but the Secretary of State in Ohio - they guy charged with making sure the voting process was fair and uncorruptable, and that all precincts had enough resources - was the leader of the Bush campaign for Ohio. The systems engineer was a Rove operative. Everything's done in secret and no one can audit the system. And when the votes are cast, there's a deviation from the poll results that make statisticians suspicious.

What? The? Fuck? How does that pass ANY sniff test, ever? Especially Blackwell's conflict of interest?

You know, you can have one orange finger and I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. Two orange fingers, and you'll still get the 'innocent until proven guilty' treatment. But when your whole hand is orange and there's cheese powder on your lips and teeth? Dude, I didn't have to see you do it to know that you stole the fucking cheetos.

Computerized election security is atrocious, and has always been atrocious. This whole argument is "it could have happened, therefore it happened." Exit polls don't mean squat.

Except that, until recently, the exit polls pretty much matched up with the election results. When they began to diverge, the reaction was, "Gosh, why are the exit polls so far off?" Hint: It wasn't the exit polls that were off.

RTFA, this issue goes way beyond "It could have happened, therefore it did". It has been shown to have happened. Additionally, this is a non-partisan issue. Stephen Spoonamore, one of the most outspoken and credible critics of electronic voting, is a Republican.

The voting machines are not beyond doubt. Any time they are being used, the losing side can cry foul. Even if they were "secure", which they are not.

The reason is that the majority of affected people cannot verify their honesty. I could audit them. Probably. Provided I'd be allowed to. Can you? Possibly. Can Joe Randomvoter? No. Joe'd have to trust us. But why should he? Why should he trust you or me? We could be part of the big conspiracy. We've been bought by those that want to steal the election. And there is actually no good way to disprove it.

With pen and paper, it's easy. Here, Joe, have all the voting cards, you can read, you can count, go check. It's very easy to debunk conspiracy theories like that with good ol' paper voting. Nearly everyone can recount that.

This is why voting machines are dangerous to democracy and faith in it. Not because they are insecure and can be rigged. The danger is that it is very hard to prove beyond doubt to technical illiterates that their pet candidate didn't lose because of shenanigans.